[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 9 points 5 months ago

Another suggestion for Darktable. It handles this case of mixed types transparently. It's a big thing to learn, but extremely powerful and capable, and you don't have to know all the corners of it, just enough for your workflow.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 9 points 6 months ago

After watching the Gamer Nexus video of what's practically a warranty scam by Asus, I'd never buy one and may never buy Asus again if that's the way they treat customers. I have a few of their ROG components in my system and from what I see they are not as great as they were 30 years ago.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 9 points 6 months ago

ESPHome is amazing - there's so much you can do without writing a single line of code.

I have built a few projects around the platform - a boiler monitor that tells me temperatures and state of zone valves, an energy monitoring system tracking electricity usage and solar export, and a hot tub mod that inhibits the heater to reduce grid import and maximize self consumption of solar. They have all been rock-solid stable.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 7 points 6 months ago

ZHA here. I picked it since it's a bit easier to set up with less bits. It works for me, so I didn't see a reason to change it. I have done channel changes a couple of times with no issue - maybe I just got lucky!

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 6 points 9 months ago

Yep, it's because of that proprietary and "every device must be licensed" nature of Z-wave that I use Zigbee devices - I'll pick an open platform everyday over a closed one, even if it has limitations.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 8 points 9 months ago

Strongly disagree. There's nothing I can do in any of the commercial CAD programs that I can't do in FreeCAD. Most people just don't want to invest the time to learn it - and instead blame the tool. Yes, there's a learning curve and it requires understanding the tool's limitations, but if it wasn't for FreeCAD we'd have nothing in the free, open source space for CAD.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

In a quick read, it sounds like the video you are referencing might be an old one. There's a lot of functionality in sketcher that is relatively new that used to be done in other workbenches. And even more in the forthcoming 0.22 release.

FreeCAD can be tricky, but once you learn a workflow that keeps things smooth, it helps a lot - and that comes with experience. And while I certainly have had to watch videos and read docs on how to do some things, I've had to do the exact same thing with commercial tools I've used. And sometimes, you just have to delete a bunch of steps and re-do them. This can be frustrating, but aside from the topology naming problem, that's really the same on the commercial products too - CAD can be frustrating. And in a lot of cases all you really need to do is go back and re-reference to work through the naming problem (such as a sketch or operation referencing a face that is now different).

In summary - it takes time and effort to learn, it's not a simple tool. Once you start to work with it, and learn to do things the way FreeCAD wants you to, it gets a lot easier and you'll be very productive.

For what it's worth, my favorite FreeCAD YouTube videos are from MangoJelly's channel. Many, many times I've been stuck on something and he will have a video on the exact thing. A recent one for me is failed fillets on curved surfaces and learning how tangency matters.

I hope this helps. It's a powerful, but complex tool, with plenty of pitfalls, but once you spend the time to work with it, it'll do what you want it to.

Oh, and one more thing - there's a commercial product Ondsel built on FreeCAD. They are contributing a lot back to FreeCAD (and I think some core FreeCAD devs are part of Ondsel). While commercially wrapped open source can be good or bad, I think this will help move things forward for FreeCAD in a positive way. I've been running Ondsel myself (it's FreeCAD at the core) as it has many 0.22 features in the current stable release.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 7 points 9 months ago

Yep, all desktop environments have this - whatever text editor is handy. :⁠-⁠)

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 8 points 11 months ago

Your root filesystem is NTFS? That's likely the problem - I'm surprised it boots at all. Switching to a Linux filesystem is the likely solution. You could also try a newer kernel, too - 5.10 is quite old, current LTS is 6.1. Good luck.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You'll be fine as long as you maintain the system, don't wait too long between updates, and pay attention to the output when you do. I'm running arch on everything - work laptop, a spare laptop, and a server (nas, Plex, home assistant, etc) - two of which are critical systems for me. I use ZFS for all storage pools, including root, and zfsbootmenu, so I can rollback to a previous snapshot if I ever need to or the system won't boot.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

That's not true. FreeCAD can do those things just fine. In fact, I have been able to do every single thing in FreeCAD that I used to do in Fusion360. There is a learning curve, but FreeCAD is extremely capable.

[-] ScottE@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

I think it would be nice if there was a more constrained, or specialized, spreadsheet option with only 2 columns, where the value of the first column is always the alias and the second column is always the value. I guess there could be other fixed optional columns like units as well.

99% of the time this is all I want - a simple list of variables. It's definitely tedious to create parameters in the current design, as great and powerful a feature as it is.

I'm not familiar with the macro mentioned - I need to look into that. If it saves one or two steps it'd be worth it.

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ScottE

joined 1 year ago